Automatic affective evaluation of pictures and words

The present work deals with the automatic processing of pictures and words associated with a particular type of affective meaning. In Experiment 1, pictures were associated with the words according to an affective quality of the objects represented. Participants had to perform an affective categorization task (positive/negative) of thirty pairs of stimuli composed of pictures and words linked in three different associations: congruent, incongruent and neutral, using the picture/word variant of the Stroop paradigm. Results show evidence of automatic affective processing: latency times were influenced by incongruent distractors, and pictures were faster than words. In Experiment 2 we wanted to see if automatic evaluation would occur even without an explicit evaluative goal. Ten pictures presented as a prime were associated to three words: the name of the picture, an affective meaning of the picture, and a neutral word. Participants had to respond to a lexical decision task. Results show that latency times of names were faster than those of emotions and neutral words; moreover, positive emotions were processed faster than negative emotions and neutral words. In both experiments there is clear evidence of an asymmetry concerning the valence of the stimuli with positive stimuli being processed faster than negative ones.

Il presente lavoro si occupa di elaborazione automatica di immagini e parole con contenuto affettivo (positivo e negativo) utilizzando, nel primo esperimento il paradigma Stroop, mentre nel secondo il paradigma del priming. I risultati mostrano che i tempi di risposta sono più veloci quando si verifica una congruenza tra stimolo e contenuto affettivo (positivo/positivo o negativo/negativo) piuttosto che quando la relazione è di incongruenza(positivo/negativo).